Regardless, he was ushering her out the door, and he had a couple of very bandido-looking dudes staring holes in the middle of his back.
“You do know there's a man with a knife watching us. Right?” she asked.
“Think nothing of it,” he replied with a shrug.
“Do you know him?” she asked, taking another quick glance and thinking a lot about it. She'd been on more than a few waterfronts along the Rio Negro, and in more than her share of roughneck bars back home in the States, once or twice in less than ideal situations. In her opinion the only situation less ideal than a grim-faced man with a knife was a grim-faced man with a gun. Whether the men were Wyoming cowboys or Brazilian caboclos, the outcome was never good.
“The one with the knife in the orange T-shirt is named Juanio. The man trying to hide a shoulder holster under his vest is called Luiz.”
“Shoulder holster?” That meant a gun. The day was definitely taking a dive.
“Garimpeiros,” he explained, as if that would be reassuring.
“Gold miners,” she translated aloud, her curiosity and wariness ratcheting up a few dozen notches. Gold miners were the bane of much of the Amazon and a particularly poisonous thorn in her side.
“Don't worry. They're only here to entertain me.”
Annie didn't bother to hide the doubtful arching of her eyebrows. “And are you finding them entertaining?” No one could be that self-assured when he had a man with a knife and another with a gun at his back.
He glanced down at her, and his mouth curved into a mischievous grin. “Very.”
“And the woman?” she asked, wondering how, or if, the dancer was involved.
His grin broadened. “Cara? Part of the package. She dances a few dances. Juanio buys me a few drinks, and Luiz makes sure I don't get distracted by any garotas who wander in off the street.”
Annie slanted him a glance, hardly classifying herself as a garota, a lovely girl, who had wandered in off the street. She knew what people saw when they looked at her. “Four-eyed academic” and “muddy-kneed botanist” came to mind, and “pint-sized pit bull” had been mentioned more often than she cared to admit, especially by other field researchers, especially if they were in her field. “Lovely girl” would be a stretch on her best day.
In two more steps, he had her back outside, under the eaves of the cantina's tin roof, the rain pouring down not six inches from where they were standing.
“I'd say Luiz is doing a damn good job.” Drunk or not, and she wasn't at all sure anymore, he'd just given her a first-class bum's rush.
He answered with a negligent shrug and stepped out from under the eaves. The rain sluiced down his body, instantly plastering his clothes to his rangy frame. He tilted his head back and dragged his hands through his hair, letting the water wash over him. For a moment, he looked like a river creature, sleek and wet, all lean muscle and coiled power, half of this world and half of the other, the rain a veil between water and air. Then he stepped back under the eaves, and the moment passed— but not without leaving her oddly disconcerted.
She didn't know what he was, but she was getting the idea that he wasn't just the simple dockside boat tramp she'd set out to find.
“If you want to come as far as Santa Maria, that's fine with me,” he said, wiping a hand across his face, and then wringing out the tail of his shirt. “Fare is a hundred and twenty reais with meals. I'm tying up at the RBC dock tonight and leaving at dawn.”
Before she could say anything, he turned back toward the cantina and within a few steps had melted into the darkened interior with his garimpeiros and package-deal mulatto woman. A new song started up on the radio.
“Damn,” she swore softly. She'd seen a lot of wild things in the rain forest, but William Sanchez Travers had just shot to the top of her list.
And who in the hell were those gold miners? She knew what they were—trouble. Garimpeiros were always trouble, especially when you mixed them with liquor and guns. Whatever deal he was working, Will Travers was sitting on a powder keg doing business with them. She just wondered how much business he was doing, and whether or not she ought to be hightailing it in another direction.
But damn, he did have a boat, and she had a place on it at dawn, which was more than she'd walked into Pancha's with, and which still made him her best bet for getting out of Manaus—and above all else, garimpeiros or not, she needed to get the hell out of Manaus.
FROM WHERE HE STOOD in the cantina's doorway, Will watched Annie Parrish make her way down the street. He'd given her a minute before coming back to check on her, and he was glad to see she'd left. He had some business on its way to the cantina, the kind of business best transacted without witnesses. Will had sent a message two hours ago to let Fat Eddie Mano know he was in town. Juanio, Luiz, Cara, and a few others had arrived shortly afterward to empty out Pancha's and keep him in place. Fat Eddie was due any minute.
A grin curved his mouth, and he lifted his bottle of beer to take a drink—Annie Parrish, the infamous Annie Parrish. When Gabriela had mentioned a woman, she was the last one he would have expected. He hadn't even known they'd let her back into the country. Gabriela must have really pulled some strings. She'd definitely laid her reputation on the line to be working with Annie Parrish, and the reason old Dr. Oliveira might have for doing that intrigued Will almost as much as Annie herself—almost, but not quite.
Given her reputation, he'd expected her to be bigger, rougher around the edges, more imposing, but she'd barely reached his chin, and the word “rough” was the last one he'd thought when he'd turned around and seen her standing behind him. “Soft” had come to mind, silky soft and golden skinned despite her scraped-up knee and the calluses he'd felt on her palm, and despite the strength of her grip when they'd shaken hands. She'd looked like a wet kitten, with her cropped blond hair sticking out all over and her gaze scrutinizing him from behind her rain-spotted, wire-rimmed glasses. Amazon Annie, he'd heard her called before the unfortunate Woolly Monkey Incident, as the case came to be known. Afterward, she'd only been called persona non grata.
He'd been way upriver at the time, but he'd heard the stories when he'd returned to Manaus. She'd been kicked out of Brazil by then, but now she was back, her pale hair framing an urchin's face with a freckled nose and cat's eyes—hazel-green—none of which had been mentioned in the stories he'd been told. In them, fact and fiction had melded together to make her sound like one of the original Amazon warrior queens, not the small, intently serious woman who'd been staring up at him from where she'd stood in a puddle of mud with one of her shoes untied. She'd looked a bit scatterbrained, with pencils and a wet notepad sticking out of one of her pockets, soggy papers fanning out of the other, and a muddy magnifying glass hanging from a cord around her neck, but Will had heard enough about her to know she had a botanically brilliant mind. She'd collected plants for some of the most famous herbariums and research institutes in the world. He had noticed a small scar near her right temple and wondered if she'd gotten it in the incident. Apparently, there had been bloodshed all around.
The thought made him distinctly uncomfortable. In another environment, and a lifetime ago, he'd been as liberated as the next man, but upriver in deep jungle no woman was safe on her own. Someone as nubile as Annie Parrish was pure jaguar bait, with every man in the forest being the jaguar—himself included. The laws that governed civilized behavior started unraveling pretty quickly in the heat and humidity of equatorial Amazonas. About the only protection a woman could have was a gun, and everyone had said Dr. Parrish had used a pretty damn big one.
He grinned. It was a little hard to imagine. Wearing baggy cargo shorts with every pocket stuffed like a kid's and a green shirt two sizes too big, she'd looked more like an underfed teenager than an Amazon. But she had known when to stop asking questions and get out of Pancha's, and she hadn't been frightened by Juanio and Luiz. She'd been curious, but not unnerved.
“Senhor,” Juanio called from back in the bar.
“Vem aqui, por favor.”
Will gave a quick glance over his shoulder and saw what he'd been waiting for—a rolling mountain of a man and a package coming through the back door, Fat Eddie and his contraband, Will's ticket to hell. He hadn't wanted Annie Parrish in the cantina when the deal got struck, and it looked as if he'd gotten her out in the nick of time. He certainly hadn't wanted to let go of her until she was out of Pancha's. Juanio and Luiz weren't quite as benign as he'd made out. He'd figured for a few minutes' worth of conversation, keeping her close to him was enough to keep her safe.
He returned his attention to the street and waited until she reached the corner. Only after she was out of sight did he turn and walk back into the bar and realize that he was still smiling. Taking Annie Parrish to Santa Maria on his boat, the Sucuri, wasn't going to be a problem. A paying passenger going upriver was always welcome. Wanting to take her farther than just up the river, however, might be a problem, and nothing could have surprised him more.
He didn't remember sopping-wet ragamuffins as being his particular type, but he couldn't deny that Dr. Parrish had held his interest. Fortunately, he'd heard enough about her to be cautious. As he recalled, it had been her lover that she'd shot.
CHAPTER 2
THREE DAYS, ANNIE TOLD HERSELF. It's only three days to Santa Maria. What could happen in three days?
Not much, she assured herself.
Or apocalypse.
“Get a grip,” she muttered, cinching up a set of plant press frames in her hut on the RBC grounds. Three days on the Rio Negro wasn't going to get them anywhere near gold-mining territory. Logic alone told her nothing was going to happen with Travers's garimpeiros on the way to Santa Maria.
Unless Juanio and Luiz were going with them.
She stopped in mid-cinch, thinking she couldn't possibly have gotten herself into that much trouble in one short afternoon.
“Nah,” she decided, shaking her head and finishing up the frames. Whatever kind of “entertainment” Travers had going with the garimpeiros, he and the miners weren't boat-ride friendly.
She set the first press aside and started on the next. Most of the cargo for the trip upriver was already stacked outside her hut, one of the thatched-roof buildings Gabriela euphemistically described as a guest house. Annie just had a couple of things left to finish. When Travers pulled up at the dock, she wanted to be ready to load everything on the boat. She'd wasted enough time in Manaus.
She knew it was a miracle the Brazilians had even let her back into the country after the fiasco that had gotten her unofficially deported, the so-called Woolly Monkey Incident. But by the grace of God and Gabriela Oliveira, the government had been convinced to give her a year to finish her research. If everything went right, at the end of the year she wouldn't be surprised if they gave her the whole damn country. For now, though, she was on shaky ground, knowing they wouldn't hesitate to exile her again if she so much as stuck her nose over any of the big black lines they'd drawn around her visa.
Unbeknown to them, she hadn't returned to Brazil to stay inside anybody's lines. In the week since she'd been back, she'd already broken half a dozen laws. The proof was lying in a pair of long, narrow crates stacked up between the door and her cot—the merchandise she'd purchased from Johnny Chang, the merchandise the slimeball didn't want hanging around Manaus any more than she wanted to hang around herself. One stint in a Brazilian jail had been enough, thank you very much, and if she never saw the inside of another cockroach-ridden cell or Corisco Vargas, the damned megalomaniac army major who had put her there, so much the better.
Truthfully, William Sanchez Travers was the least of her problems. She just wanted to keep it that way.
With the last of the press frames secure, she double-checked her supplies of alcohol, glycerol, and stove fuel and hauled them all outside. She had a milk crate each of rice and beans, and a few tins of canned meat and fruit. Finding fruits and edible vegetables in gardens abandoned by the Indians and in the surrounding secondary forest was part of her research, and she was good enough at it to feed herself and a family of four.
Not that she was going to be spending enough time doing research to feed anybody. She hadn't fought her way back to the Amazon in order to continue her data collection on peach palms and the reforestation of abandoned swiddens, despite what the proposal she'd submitted to RBC said. There was a prize of untold riches waiting for her up the Rio Cauaburi, and if it hadn't been for the army major, the woolly monkey, and the damned garimpeiro she'd had to shoot, the prize would already be hers. Now she had another chance, and if she pulled it off, she would be famous with her reputation secure, instead of infamous with her reputation hanging in shreds.
Her gaze strayed past Johnny Chang's crates to the small black fanny pack tucked up under her pillow on the cot. Leaning over, she pulled the pack out and knew she held the future in her hands. Not just her future, but something for the future of all mankind. Johnny Chang's crates were only for any trouble that might get in the way of that future.
The running patter of feet approaching from outside brought her head around, her hands tightening on the pack.
“Annie. Annie,” a small voice called. “Grandmama says for you to come.”
A smile curved Annie's mouth as she rose to her feet and crossed to the open door. Lifting her hand high, she hid the pack by stuffing it into the thatched eaves above the jamb, before she leaned outside.
“Oi, Maria. Tudo bent?” she said to Gabriela's six-year-old granddaughter, a chubby little beauty with bouncy black pigtails and big, melting brown eyes. As the director of RBC, Dr. Oliveira had a house on the coalition's thirty acres of lushly landscaped gardens and cultivated fields. Another twenty or so researchers were housed in the guest cabanas, some of them just passing through, like herself, others working in RBC's labs. Annie was on her second stint with RBC.
“O, terrível, Annie, terrível.” Maria scrunched her little face up and gave a disconsolate shake to her head. “Tomas's puppy ate my frog, and now he won't give it back.”
Schooling her features into an appropriately grave expression, Annie knelt down.
“Trust me, honey, you don't want the frog back. What you want is a new frog, and I saw lots of them in your grandmother's fountain next to the lab.”
Maria's face brightened. “Nice, big fat ones?”
“The fattest,” Annie promised.
Maria ran off down the path, shouting over her shoulder, “Don't forget Grandmama!”
Annie was unlikely to forget the formidable matriarch of RBC, the woman who had saved her twice, once from a Brazilian jail, and the second time from the obscurity of a lab assistant's job at the University of Wyoming. Annie had cooled her heels for nearly a year at home on the great western plains of North America, trying to get back to the Amazon. She never would have made it without Gabriela Oliveira's support.
She looked down at herself and grimaced. She hadn't changed clothes since she'd gotten drenched looking for Travers, and a summons from Gabriela required better than shorts that drooped to her knees and a green shirt that had seen better days.
Looking around by the door, she spotted the duffel bag that held her bathroom kit and clean clothes. She reached for it—and froze.
Her outstretched fingers slowly curled back into her palm. A trickle of fear ran down her spine.
Snail snake, she told herself, looking at the small coiled colubrid nestled in the shadows between her duffel and a gallon of alcohol. The snake was nothing more than a harmless Dipsas indica—and it still made Annie's skin crawl.
“Damn,” she whispered as the snake slithered off and disappeared into the leaf litter. Her best friend, Mad Jack Reid, had assured her she would outgrow her aversion to snakes the same way someday he would outgrow wild women, but neither had happened yet. It was still one of the great ironies of her life that she hated snakes and yet loved the snake-infested jungle of the rain forest—all the lush, overgrown plants and towering canopy trees, a
nd above all the rare jewels tucked in between, the Orchidaceae.
She glanced over at the doorjamb where she'd hidden the small black pack in the palm thatch. Mad Jack would have her butt in a sling if he found out where she'd gone, and what she was doing.
There had been a time before she'd been exiled, a few short days on the Rio Cauaburi, when she'd thought all the world could be hers. The illusion hadn't lasted long.
The Woolly Monkey Incident had changed everything, tumbling her from glory into the depths of doom so fast there had been days she'd wondered if she would survive.
Well, she had survived. Not only survived, but gotten back to Brazil, and this time she would not be denied. Johnny Chang's crates would see to that, friggin' Corisco Vargas or no Corisco Vargas.
With the snake gone, she grabbed the duffel bag and headed off for a quick cleanup at the bathhouse.
“IT'S TIME YOU CAME BACK into the fold, William,” Gabriela said from behind her big mahogany desk piled high with papers and various potted plants, most of them straggling toward death's door. At sixty-eight, she had hair that was white as snow and was twisted into a tidy French roll at the back of her head. Her hands shook slightly with palsy, but her mind and her eyes were crystal clear, missing very little of what went on at RBC or anywhere else in the Amazon. “You've been running wild for too long.”
Will could hardly disagree with her last statement, and he could hardly agree to the first, which left him in a bit of a bind.
“You could water your plants,” he suggested, lifting one limp leaf where it lay comatose on a neatly bound research proposal.
“I'm a botanist, not a gardener,” the old woman informed him with a haughty arch to her brow, “and you're avoiding the question.”
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